Imperial Democracy

In his polemical essay appended to War and Peace, deriding biographical determinism as a sovereign principle of historiography, Tolstoy observed that, "We say: Napoleon chose to invade Russia and he did so. In reality we never find in all Napoleon's doings anything like an expression of that design: what we find is a series of commands or expression of his will of the most various and undefined tendency." Professor May's well-documented treatise on the awkward manner in which the United States reluctantly consented to become an imperial power during the last decade of the nineteenth century lends additional force to the critique of history conceived as design.
We are presented with the paradox of a conquest directed by the likes of Cleveland and McKinley, of an epic with no political heroes. During an incredibly brief period, the US managed to invoke the Monroe Doctrine against the British in Venezuela, defeat Spain... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

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